


Forward Distortion

by campylobacter



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Action/Adventure, Big Bang Challenge, F/M, First Time, M/M, Romance, Team
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-13
Updated: 2011-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-20 09:15:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campylobacter/pseuds/campylobacter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The former team members of SG-1 reunite on Col. Samantha Carter's <i>USS Hammond</i> to bring the Ark of Truth to a remote planet off the Stargate network where a renegade Prior is rumored to enslave the population in the production of kassa. Along the way, Sam's tests on the Ark cause disturbing side effects involving dreams of events that Teal'c won't corroborate. And of course once SG-1 reaches the planet, Vala confronts someone from her past, while Daniel must helplessly watch as things don't go according to plan...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Day We Have

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the 2010 LiveJournal one_prompt challenge "This is it... This is going to be the day we have a nice, sane, boring mission." Because it grew out of control and way past the deadline, it's now a June 2011 Stargate_Summer Big Bang story. EDITORS: hummingfly67, shakespherical; STORY & CANON CONSULTANTS: cleothemuse, lc59; FRENCH PROOFREADER: lusitaniaotter
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS: Daniel is forced to watch what appears to be a video of Vala being sexually tortured. Non-consensual scenes with antagonist are R/Mature (implied oral, anal, bukkake); romance scenes NC-17/Adult (explicit sexual content); also depicts incidental characters suffering symptoms of drug addiction.

" _—démander grâce pour Vala_." Of all the times to beam me up, mid-sentence in a language I learned as a child among the intelligentsia of Cairo is one of the worst. A dozen pairs of eyes stare at me from their stations on the bridge of the _USS Hammond_. It's the familiar and sympathetic face at the helm whose name comes to mind the quickest: "Major Marks, you've gotta beam me back." The abrupt return to English feels foreign. "I'm in the middle of negotiating the team's release—"

"Doctor Jackson," Lieutenant Colonel Achebe (Sam's second in command) addresses me from the big chair. "Colonel Carter hasn't checked in, and your signal's the only one we could lock on reliably. At least take back a communicator or a weapon--"

"No! Their guards'll just search me again. Just beam me back down. Please. Look, you're all understandably worried about your commanding officer, but there's no time to brief you. Colonel Carter's okay, and I think the rest of the team's gonna be fine — but only if I can get back now."

"Very well, Doctor," she consents, despite the worry creasing her brow. "But we'll be monitoring constantly for your signals and will beam up all of you the instant we detect undistorted patterns. The search and rescue team is in place at the Bravo Point and will deploy in ninety minutes if we do not hear from you. Good luck." She nods to the helmsman. "Initiate transporter."

The bridge of the _Hammond_ whites out, and the hot-cold swarm of light prickles my skin again as I'm rematerialized into a chapel treasury on a planet without a Stargate.

Sometimes I think this is it; this is going to be the day we have a nice, sane, boring mission, and I can take a break from hazardous duty.

This is __so not that day.


	2. Invisible Rock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vala tells how the adventure first began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One Month Before the Day

This entire, charming adventure began almost a month ago on P2X-2K6 (which Cameron and I dubbed "C'Poras: Cold Piles of Rock and Sludge") whilst Daniel video-recorded our trek to the nearest ridge. At the crest, the crisp, cloudless sky allowed us an unobstructed view of open terrain several hundred klicks southwest-ward, to yet more decidedly uninhabited cold piles of rock and sludge. Before we implemented the unanimous decision to return to the 'Gate, I sat on an ugly boulder to knock the mud off my boots.

"Hey guys, notice anything unusual about that rock?" Daniel asked. "It's different from the rest of the rocks on this moraine."

I snatched the camera from him and pointed it towards my face, at arm's length. "Unusual in that there's a cold but seductively attractive explorer perched on it without a sexy archaeologist to keep her warm?"

He sputtered and looked at my feet (to avoid admiring the way I arched my back) and then crouched to peer more closely at the rock.

"Move," he snapped, "there's some sort of writing here." My kicking had knocked off the dirt crusted on a metal panel embedded in the boulder, which triggered Daniel's excitement over old, boring objects. "Oh my god, it's in _Furling_."

"Cool!" Cameron exclaimed. "What's it say?"

"I have no idea. There are other glyphs here, too, that aren't in their alphabet. Vala, give back the camera."

After a few more fruitless hours of searching for the Key to the Secret of the Mysterious Ugly Rock, Cameron decided there wasn't anything else on the planet interesting enough to lengthen our stay, so we and the MALP returned to the SGC. After a mercifully short debriefing (General Landry could endure only two minutes' worth of video footage of rock close-ups), I followed Daniel to Dr. Lee's office where they struggled to figure out the engraving. Using the Spiral of Basics (or "periodic table of elements", as the Tau'ri call them) and the known interactions of chemical bonds, he and Dr. Lee deciphered the glyphs into an octal series of numerals and mathematical symbols that described several equations. I assisted by asking lots of questions and ensuring they took meal breaks. Cameron filed a composite mission report, grumbling about wasting his skills on "pushing paper".

Several days later, Dr. Lee presented their findings to the general, and suggested transmitting the microwave signal specified in one of the equations to the Ugly Rock. Unfortunately, our ever-curious Daniel volunteered SG-1's return to P2X-2K6 before Teal'c could return from reconstruction efforts on Dakara, instead of handing off the mission to another team.

So just the three of us revisited "C'Poras" — the weather hadn't changed one jot — with the proper equipment. From a safe distance, Daniel and I used a handheld transmitter to send signals to the boulder as Cameron kept watch on the other side of it. It didn't explode, or transform, or open a portal to a secret chamber of treasure; it disappeared!

Actually, it was cloaked. And transmitting more signals to it wouldn't get it to de-cloak, no matter what variations Daniel insisted I enter.

"Times like this I really miss Sam." Cameron tossed pebbles at the thing to watch its cloak shimmer. "What kind of idjits need an invisible rock with no 'off' switch?"

"We can't just leave it here." Daniel stamped his feet in either frustration or an effort to keep warm. "The rest of the equations describe a very specific geosynchronous orbit, which is where Dr. Lee suspected it fell from, in a decaying trajectory."

Later that week, Muscles finally left Dakara and met us at the Alpha Site.

"I have returned in the now-repaired _tel'tak_ Vala Mal Doran had procured for a previous mission to rescue the _Odyssey_." I could tell he was glad to see us by the subtle relaxation of tension in his shoulders as he waited to greet us at the end of the ramp. "We may depart for P2X-2K6 at your earliest convenience."

Within a few hours, we were once again back at C'poras, which was surprisingly quite green and tropical when viewed from orbit. We flew closer to its Stargate near the South Pole to ring Ugly Rock off the planet and on board, and then released it into the planet's high orbit, as specified by the rest of the Furling equations.

After an hour of transmitting more signals to the invisible (formerly asteroid-colored) lump, a thought occurred to me. "I've an ideaÖ" I said, and activated the _tel'tak_ 's cloak, without even needing to kick the center console.

The Ugly Rock reappeared, looking like an ordinary asteroid, and began broadcasting telemetry that our SGC microwave equipment detected along the same frequency as our original transmission.

"That's weird," Daniel commented as he looked over my shoulder at the readout. "It's transmitting the location of our _tel'tak_ , not its own location."

"Smack me sideways," whooped Cameron. "A Goa'uld cloak detector!"

I was a bit disappointed that it hadn't turned into gold or platinum, but the SGC and IOA were delighted with their new toy, and had it put into orbit around a _naquadah_ mining planet whose populace suffered from _kassa_ addiction. A few days later, the detector pinpointed a cloaked, retro-fitted Lucian Alliance troop transport which was impounded by SG-3 when it landed.

Upon inspection, a full hold of _kassa_ and some curious glass bottles of pale purple syrup were discovered. The smugglers were rather piqued at having lost so lucrative a score.

"How did you detect my ship?" demanded the pilot, who'd been brought to the SGC for further questioning.

"We seen you rollin'," Cameron said. "We hatin'. Patrollin'. We done caught you ridin' dirty."

"What's he on about?" I asked Daniel as we watched from the observation room.

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his head. "You haven't been deafened in the parking lot when he blasts that song through the subwoofers in his car."

"Actually, I have." I patted his shoulder in empathy and whispered, "But it was a rather anarchic song about telling 'the police' to, um, get buggered."

"Colonel Mitchell," General Landry barked at him over the comm, "just ask him where the crop was grown."

The pilot refused to cooperate until a few hours later, when withdrawal symptoms compelled him to beg for "mauve nectar". His eyes seemed greener when the whites were bloodshot.

"Our analysis of the substance indicates that it's a highly concentrated distillate of the psycho-stimulant in _kassa_ ," remarked Dr. Lam, who had joined us in the observation room. "This 'mauve nectar' has almost ten times the addictive properties of the strongest known narcotics. I'm guessing that it's meant to be diluted for 'street sale', so to speak."

"Makes smuggling delightfully convenient when you don't have to risk spoiling huge quantities of fresh corn," I said.

Daniel nodded and frowned in thought.

"All righty, Tweek, who's brewing the silage?" Cameron, in the interrogation room, tried again, this time waving a spoonful of diluted _kassa_ syrup under the pilot's nose. "Who's cooking the space corn meth?"

"An Ori Prior on _Bicoque_." The pilot's mouth nearly snapped the spoon out of Cameron's hand, had not the colonel's reflexes been faster.

"Easy there, homeboy. Give us the 'Gate address, first."

" _Bicoque_ has no Stargate. Give me the Nectar," the pilot groaned and began to rock against his restraints. "Please... the coordinates are in my ship's navigation archives, listed as '34606'." Cameron watched in fascinated disgust as the man greedily lapped every trace of syrup from the spoon.


	3. Graveyard Shift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strange dreams haunt SG-1 after the Ark is activated, as told by Daniel & Cam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 17 Days Before the Day

"You're gonna die when you see this, Daniel," Vala exclaimed, after she opened the storage crate in the _Hammond_ 's loading bay on the first day of our journey to _Bicoque_."No one at Area 51 even bothered to look at it since you'd packed it away." As proof, she pointed to a yellow sticky note in her handwriting that said "Don't Panic", stuck to the central red orb in the Ark's control dome. I was unsure whether she'd read the Douglas Adams book or had watched the unfortunate movie based on it, but the Area 51 technicians would've filed a complaint if they'd seen the note.

"No time to die today." I didn't remember Vala being present when I'd sealed the crate, but I did remember the same oddly cut pieces of bubble wrap. "Sam and I only have sixteen days to study it before we arrive on _Bicoque_."

"Will that allow sufficient time to determine whether it can be reprogrammed to broadcast messages that are not truthful, Daniel Jackson?"

"I don't know, Teal'c." I removed the rest of the bubble wrap. "But I don't wanna waste ten minutes waiting for the quartermaster to requisition a cart to move the Ark to the lab, so if you get the back end while we take the front, we'll start right away."

"I like your initiative, darling," Vala purred to me as we hoisted it out of the crate and carried it by its side bearing poles. "If we can re-program this thing to play calypso, Karaoke Night will become a lot more jolly."

"I'm gonna kill Mitchell for teaching you 'The Banana Boat Song'."

The rest of the day couldn't've been more monotonous; pressing the same sequence of keys on the Ark repeatedly while Sam, Vala, Teal'c and Mitchell measured power fluctuations in several Ori staffs at various locations throughout the ship went by a little faster when Mitchell got Vala to stop singing "Day-o!" over our comms. Unfortunately, it meant that I had to convince her that there's no translation for "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da," the song he set on Repeat for her iPod. Sam called a halt to the experiments when she and Vala started feeling queasy from being irradiated dozens of times in the glow of Ori subspace beams.

Late that night in the officer's mess, I found Vala sitting at the table next to the window screen, with her head buried in her arms. Back home, it would've been three in the morning.

I tapped her shoulder. "Vala, what's wrong?"

She sat up and wiped her eyes. "Couldn't sleep. Stupid dream."

"Can't be as stupid as the dream I had. Kept hearing Hank Landry discussing Credence Clearwater Revival albums with Thor at the foot of my bed. You know, I'm kinda worried about him."

Vala's eyes widened. "Hank..." she used his first name, not his rank, as though she'd grown accustomed to referring to him with an easy familiarity. "Me too. I mean, we were plants. I was a fern—"

"What?"

"My dream, silly. I was a fern, and Sam, who was a ficus, noticed General Landry wasn't there anymore to water us, and I started, well, weeping fronds, and... I know this is wonko — I hardly know him — but I miss him _awfully_. And it's only been twenty-nine hours since I last saw him."

A feeling of _dé j'a vu_ unsettled me as I sat across from Vala at that table, as though nothing I could do would console her for this particular situation. The irrationality of it finally forced me to get up and search through the adjacent kitchen for some type of remedy.

While I made us chamomile tea, Sam came into the mess, followed by Teal'c. Mitchell arrived five minutes later. Teal'c listened with more outward interest than usual as we all related nonsensical dreams about Landry. Sam's recent sub-space communication eight hours earlier confirmed that he was alive, doing well, and had more protocols from the IOA to relay to us. There were also directives and private messages from Jack for me, Sam and Teal'c.

"I know you can't tell us what happened on the _Odyssey_ in the time dilation bubble, Teal'c, but we seem to be mourning the loss of a man who isn't dead," Sam said. Her dream had been of playing a crystal cello and sight-reading a "general sonata" when the notes on her sheet music suddenly vanished. "And I'm assuming that in the fifty-odd years we— um, _you_ were there, it's not likely the general lived to be well over one-hundred years old."

"What would be the purpose of speculating about those events, Samantha Carter?"

"Well, somehow they're impacting the way we function in this timeline."

"Then perhaps you should discuss these issues with General Landry, who is the only one of the six of us not on board this ship, to see if he is experiencing the same phenomenon." Teal'c made no mention of having dreams, but did admit to needing an unscheduled shot of _tretonin_.

"Man, I gotta tell General Landry he was the white king on a chessboard, and I was the white knight hopping around him," Mitchell said, "trying to defend him in an endgame that never ended."

=C=

Jackson didn't look too freaked out by his dream, but Sam sure did by hers. T paid her extra attention, even offering to see her back to her quarters, which she accepted without a word. Vala was so shook up, Jackson made her a cup of tea and hung around until she finished it, kinda hovering and walking her to her quarters before going back to his.

In hyperspace, there's no day or night, so we set our routine by SGC time and adjust ship-wide ambient light levels to fool our circadian rhythms into regular sleeping and waking patterns. At least that's how Carolyn Lam explains it.

Sam follows SOP and keeps a skeleton crew on the _Hammond_ 's graveyard shift, which sounds a whole lot creepier when you're having the same weird dream night after night. During the times I'm out of bed and walking the halls to clear my mind, I swear I see things out of the corner of my eye that aren't there when I look at them straight-on. A munitions storage room is a green jungle one second, then just regular racks of weapons the next. Or in my own quarters, with model airplanes hanging from the ceiling that I know aren't there, but I can remember building as a kid.

I hear weird stuff, too. Loud, fast footsteps down one corridor, like someone's running toward me in sneakers, not boots. Sometimes it's not footsteps, but a strange rolling sound, like a little cart skating by. Or classical music — just one instrument, one of those big violins. A cello, I think, playing beautiful and sad-like, coming from the engine control room. Or the clatter of Sodan sticks knocking against each other, coming from inside the exercise room, but nobody's there.

Like I said, creepy.

Too weird to write into a report, because I don't rightly know if it's stuff I dreamed, or stuff I hallucinate while awake. When I walk by Sam's lab, where the Ark's locked up, I get chills down my spine. Gramma used to say the feeling means "someone's walking on my grave".

Yeah, there's a thought to calm you to sleep.

Something just ain't right with that Ark, but near as I can tell, only me, Sam, Teal'c, Vala and Jackson are affected.

General Landry's A-OK back home, and the rest of the crew seems to be doing just dandy. Not sure I wanna ask them about it, though.


	4. The Whisper of a Turned Page

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel realizes he's missing something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 16 - 10 Days Before the Day

Sam's original mission had been to position a peripheral defense station against potential Wraith incursions to the Milky Way; this meant that the 5-day journey to Bicoque stretched into 17 days as we stopped to test the installation. It also meant that Vala quickly tired of Mitchell's music collection and raided mine. I found myself explaining the various genres of Earth's folk music to her, including koto, bluegrass, mbalax, raga, zydeco, rai, and mariachi.

"What are they saying?" she asked after inserting earbuds in my ears while I was trying to run in the exercise room.

When I tried to explain that _'Tit Galop Pour Mamou_ is what the Cajun wagon driver is saying to make his mule go faster, she took back her earbuds and increased my treadmill speed to 12MPH.

"I much prefer Samantha's explanations of Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge lyrics," she said as she turned back to her treadmill.

Teal'c and Mitchell paused in cracking _Sodan_ sticks at each other to watch me roll off the machine when she bent over to tie her shoe.

"What?" I snapped at them, pulling myself upright. "She cranked up the setting."

"Yeah Jackson. Nothing to do with her bike shorts."

\- - -

After leaving the installation of the unmanned station and entering hyperspace again, we began a different series of tests on the Ark. My strange dreams of being tattooed with bright, glowing Asgard runes dissipated into insomnia. But the sleeplessness was aggravated by the feeling that something vital was missing from my room, which, despite its small size, echoed with an oppressive emptiness.

Letters from Jack and the dozen or so books I'd brought along were the only things keeping me company when Vala pinged my door in the middle of the night, clutching a pillow to her chest.

"Daniel, something's wrong with the lights in my quarters. They're not bright enough. And my room's freezing. Also, I can hear the plumbing." Her eyes were clouded with the same type of anxiety I'd been feeling. "I think this battlecruiser needs to drop out of hyperspace."

"Here, read this," I said, handing her the Landström-illustrated Friberg translation of _The Kalevala_ that I'd been comparing to the original Finnish. "I don't like my room, either. Maybe we can switch."

She pouted. "Can't I just curl up in that chair over there until I warm up? Drinking tea just keeps me going to the bathroom."

My hand hovered over the servo switch to close the door in her face, but something stopped me. It wasn't the look in her eyes that betrayed a hint of vulnerability or a fear of being rejected; it was the way she squeezed the book into the pillow, as though she were thankful she could hold onto something I gave her.

"Um, knock yourself out." I stepped aside and awkwardly waved toward the chair. "I was gonna stay up a little while longer anyway to read a book Sam gave me on star cartography."

She darted inside and snatched a blanket from my bed, then nestled herself into the chair with _The Kalevala_ , looking at the pictures. We each read separately in a comfortable silence broken only by the whisper of a turned page.

After a half hour, I heard her mumbling, "Can I hold her…? She needs to be fed and cared for…"

When I went to wake her, I noticed that she'd been reading Song 45, "Death's Daughter Gives Birth", her fingers curled into the passage:

 _But a blast of wind came blowing.  
From the east a furious storm wind  
Blew her heavy, big with child,  
Pregnant in a treeless country_

I carefully took the book from her hands.

"Wait, wait... I want to hold her."

"Hey," I said softly, brushing strands of her hair from a cheek wet with tears. "Vala? It's okay. You're having a bad dream; I should've given you the Boseley translation."

"Tomin?" She opened her eyes and blinked in bewilderment at the light from the reading lamp. "Oh... Daniel. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry, Daniel," she burst into a sob. "I lost the baby."

The anguish in her face startled me; she'd always denied feeling any sorrow over Adria. "No, Vala, shhh." I knelt and put my hand on her arm. "You're not in the Ori galaxy. You're here on the _Hammond_. It was just a dream. It's okay now."

"I never got to—" she gasped and squeezed her eyes shut to suppress another sob, "We could have been—" Her entire body shook with silent grief.

Vala had never volunteered details of her daughter's birth, and this revelation touched an old, deep wound: Sha're never got the chance to hold her newborn, either.

I pulled Vala to my chest and let her cry into my t-shirt. Doing so somehow felt familiar... was it the time I'd taken the gun from her in the warehouse after her memory had been accidentally erased? Her body felt smaller and more fragile than I remembered; even when I'd zatted her on the _Prometheus_ , her limp, lolling body had been defiantly unwieldy. Huddled and trembling in my arms, she felt elusive, ethereal, like a memory that would slip away unless I held on.

After a few minutes, she drew a long breath as she leaned back and looked around the room. "It was several dreams twisted into one stupid dream, really. These Daedalus-class ships all look alike," she said with a nervous chuckle, "and this chair isn't as comfortable as it looks."

"Yeah," I nodded in agreement. "It's not much better than something in a hospital waiting room. You're gonna wake up with a terrible backache if you don't lie down on a real bed."

"If you insist," she huffed, sat up, then shuffled to my bed and flopped down in a wool-covered heap on top of the covers, huddled around her pillow. I didn't have the heart to insist that she return to her quarters, but I wasn't going to spend a night in that chair. After a few sniffles, however, she was soon fast asleep, so I decided to let her stay on that side of the bed in case her scrambled memories caused another nightmare.

I put away the books and turned off the light, undressing to boxers in the darkness before I slipped under the covers. The sound of her deep, even breathing soon lulled me into the first dreamless sleep I'd had in more than a week.

She still had on her fuzzy slippers when I woke her in the morning.


End file.
